Tamura's traumatic experience records the disintegration of a personality, the splitting of a self into selves with attendant psychotic confusion and frustration. The journey of discovery ends in madness. Ooka is putting the very concept "human" on trial. Early in his narrative Tamura notes the onset of the trouble: "Fundamentally, I suppose, my recent confusion of thought and feeling derived from the fact that the equilibrium between my inner consciousness and the outer world had begun to break down. This process had started when I was being transported across the ocean to fight and kill, and I suddenly had realized that I had not the slightest will either to fight or to kill" (p. 19). By the end of the novel he is obsessed with the problem of his identity and vacillates between his roles as "First-Class Private Tamura" and "an angel of God" (pp. 238, 242). Perhaps he has begun to internalize the external world; the madness of war has brought him to wonder if he too is meant to kill, ironically as a "destroying angel." Ooka provides considerable ironic depth and no little ambiguity for the record with his melange of Christian and Buddhist symbolism, descriptions of natural beauty, sexual reminiscences, and philosophical reflections on motion and "retrograde amnesia." At least part of the message, however, is clear enough. In an insane world, where death is the norm., where bloated, fly-ridden, mutilated corpses serve as caricatures of men, madness is the only logical response. When the life-process is inverted, when the community of men is a community of killers, the schizophrenic retreat is not only understandable but, ironically, the only appropriate action. Only madness can redress the balance.
The difference in the two books illustrates this point. The good doctor-author of No Requiem fills his narrative with quotidian details. If he notes the many deaths and hardships, he also provides the reader with numerous maps and charts which indicate even the sleeping positions of the men. Maps and charts are affirmations of order; they testify to locations and directions. One consults them to get his bearings. Perhaps even more reassuring are diagrams of shelters where even the locations of cauldrons, vegetable baskets, and mess-tins are considered worthy of mention. By contrast, the landscape of Fires on the Plain is dominated by images of death, from the darkly symbolic forests to the shattered corpses. When Tamura begins his journey, he enters the woods. "It was dark within the forest.... A death-like hush hovered over the enormous trees.... Here they had stood for decades and decades before I passed beneath them, and here they would continue to stand long after my death.... What was strange was the complete contradiction existing in my mind between the knowledge that I was passing here for the first time and the certainty that I would never pass here in the future" (p. 16). The gloomy forest and gloomy thoughts foreshadow the experience to follow, when death will dominate the scene. "Everywhere I saw bodies," Tamura recalls after an attack by enemy troops. "Their vivid guts and blood shone in the sun's rain washed beams, while on the grass their severed legs and arms looked like the remains of so many broken dolls. Only the flies were moving" (p. 172). And unlike the well-charted terrain of Dr. Moriya, the deathscape of Private Tamura sometimes becomes the nightmare projection of his own tortured psyche. "My next memory is an image of the forest seen from the distance. It was dark, like a Japanese cedar wood, and there was an insensate quality about the surroundings. It was hateful to me" (p. 224). 'Thus for the narrator of No Requiem, the external world retains a well-defined, objective validity, while for Private 'Tamura the world continually blends with his imagination, the mixture of dream and reality, vision and nightmare reflecting his troubled mind.
The religious theme gives ironic depth to the narrative. Attracted by the sight of a cross on a church steeple, 'Tamura, clutching his rifle, descends to the village to "resolve the religious doubt" that has visited him at the "end of his life" (p. 86). He has previously dreamed about the church, and witnessed his own funeral with a "coffin draped in black" where one of his selves lies, while another "I" observes the proceedings. When he reaches the village, images of death greet him. A "black swarm of carrion crows" perches on the church roof and arms of the cross; the church doors are black. At the foot of the church steps lie rotting corpses, "grotesque transfigurations of putrescence." Surprised by a young couple who have returned to the deserted town for a hidden cache of salt, Tamura murders the woman in the presbytery of the church, and adds one more "self" to his already confused identity. "I had to acknowledge that I was now no more than a brutish soldier who, far from being able to communicate with God, could not even mix with his fellow creatures" (p. 115-16). Private Tamura ends his curious confrontation with the Western passion symbol feeling that he no longer belongs to humankind.
Near the climax of the novel, Tamura encounters a dying officer crazed from suffering. The helpless man is covered with flies and leeches. As a symbol, the officer is an ironic composite, half Christ-figure, half Beelzebub.9 Appropriately, when he offers his flesh to Tamura shortly before dying, the offer is a mixture of blessing and temptation. The analogy with Christ and the Mass is made explicit after the officer's death. "I remembered Jesus' arms, strained from hanging, which I had seen in the seaside village," Tamura says. But the demonic possibility too is suggested. "I was obsessed by the words that he had murmured before his death. For some reason these words, intended as an invitation, acted instead as a ban" (p. 184). Tamura's divided mind finds physical expression. His left hand seizes his right, and prevents it from using his bayonet on the dead man. After this experience Tamura has a strange religious vision (or hallucination) of an "unknown tropical flower" which says, "You may eat me if you like!" He then imagines great masses of flowers falling from the sky and hears what he takes to be the voice of God saying, "Consider the lilies of the field" (pp. 190-91). Much of the time he feels, as he has felt so often during his wilderness trek, that he is being watched. This feeling (do the "eyes" represent a projection of his guilt? a paranoid fear? a feeling of God's presence?) keeps the reader aware that the point of view here is that of a deranged mind.
The eyes finally assume human form in the person of Nagamatsu, who rescues Tamura, revives him with water and what turns out to be human flesh (an ironic communion?), and keeps him alive until the climax when Nagamatsu kills Yasuda and is in turn killed by Tamura. The meaning of the religious motif is difficult to determine; the point of view (a sick mind) keeps one from being dogmatic. But part of the significance, at least, emerges from the ironic juxtaposition of redemption and destruction, feeding and killing, living and dying. Can these seeming opposites be reconciled? Can twentieth-century man, postwar man, with new and ever more sophisticated means of serving either end-eating or killing-find his role in his world? Can he count on divine aid? Tamura's religious yearnings are roused only when he faces death; when he confronts the crucified Christ (the crucifix in the church), he becomes a murderer. The profound import of the Communion gift of body and blood is only apparent (and then only to a distorted mind) when he sees that men must literally eat one another to stay alive. Perhaps the book's ironic possibilities are best summed up in the ubiquitous and symbolic fires on the plain. They suggest that man's response to his world may be natural or unnatural; they may be "genuine bonfires" for burning waste husks, or guerrilla signals to mark human targets. They may also be God's purifying fire of judgment. If so, then Tamura's last remarks are more than mere hallucinatory ramblings. Perhaps he speaks as an inspired shaman-sage, mad with the truth.10 If man's insanity is somehow compatible with divine purpose, then indeed "glory be to God."
Like No Requiem and Fires on the Plain, Takeda's Luminous Moss centers around an incident which takes place during the last year of the war in the Pacific. In an introductory narrative-essay, the author tells of his trip to Rausu in Hokkaido. Amid signs of postwar prosperity, he is guided to Makkaushi Cave, where he sees the famous "luminous moss." He also learns of a wartime incident of cannibalism which occurred in the vicinity. At the "apex of the War" a small ship had been wrecked in a storm; the captain and a crew member had straggled ashore on a "storm-driven, snow-laden beach." Two months later, the captain had appeared, sole survivor of the tragedy. But after fishermen had discovered evidences of cannibalism and the captain had confessed to having eaten his dead comrade, the "beautiful wartime drama" had become in the eyes of the people a tale of terror, the "courageous captain" a beast-like criminal. Author Takeda follows his essay with an imaginative recreation of the "incident" and the captain's trial in the form of a closet drama.
As in the other works, men, dying of starvation, resort to eating human flesh to stay alive. Like Ooka, Takeda has a symbol of the human heart, though more obvious, in the Makkaushi
